New evidence shows 'Viking burials' predate Vikings
The discovery of 1,300-year-old ship nails in a burial mound in Norway raises new questions about who was actually entombed there.
Near the harbor of Norway’s Leka Island, there lies a vast, ancient burial mound called Herlaugshaugen. Stretching some 200 feet long and reaching nearly four stories high, the earthen mound dominates the landscape.
“It was the first thing people saw when they came to this island,” says Geir Grønnesby, an archaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “There was a rumor that there was a ship in the mound, but no one knew for certain.”
For centuries, historians thought Herlaugshaugen was the final resting place of the Viking-era king Herlaug, who died in A.D. 871. According to later Icelandic literature, Herlaug chose to be buried alive with his men inside a mound tomb, rather than concede defeat to a rival king.
Death shaped the landscape of the Vikings and their forebears. Funeral rites among the Norse warriors were many and varied. Some people were cremated, but a few powerful leaders were buried in large mounds in prominent places.
“These mounds are meant to be seen,” says Grønnesby. “They are markers of power and legacy.”
In June 2023, Grønnesby and his colleagues went to Leka to investigate whether there was a ship inside Herlaugshaugen. They set out with metal detectors to find clinker nails, a characteristic rivet used to fasten overlapping planks of wood on a vessel.
The team extracted 29 large iron nails, along with wood fragments, from the mound, confirming there was indeed a longship buried inside.
But radiocarbon dating of the wood attached to the nails and other organic material found in layers of charcoal and shell sand used to cover the ship suggests the burial occurred around A.D. 700, about a century before the start of the Viking Age—and nearly two centuries before Herlaug’s death.
The discovery, which was published in April in the journal Antiquity, marks Herlaugshaugen as the oldest known ship burial in Norway. It suggests that the forebears of the Vikings had powerful leaders who organized the backbreaking work of building huge burial mounds. It also provides insight into the strong cultural links that ancient Norse society maintained across the North Sea, including to early medieval England.
“This is very exciting because it shows the practice of ship burial has deeper roots in Scandinavia than previously known,” says Howard Williams, an archaeologist at the University of Chester, who was not involved in the research. “It’s a myth that these elaborate ship burials belong only to the Viking Age.”
Bridging the gap
The Museum of the Viking Age in Oslo houses the remains of Norway’s most famous ship burials from the era when Scandinavian fleets began to expand their influence across northern Europe, beginning with a Norse raid on an English monastery in A.D. 793. These impressive vessels include the Oseberg ship, buried around A.D. 834, and the Gokstad ship, buried around A.D. 900.
Viking ship burials were religious affairs, as well as family monuments and places of remembrance. Until recently, archaeologists had not found other large ship burials in Scandinavia that date before around A.D. 780 AD, though they knew of several small boat burials.
But there is a notable example of a much earlier elaborate ship burial on England’s eastern coast, called Sutton Hoo, dated to around A.D. 630. This ship is thought to be the final resting place of an early medieval English king, Rædwald of East Anglia.
The discovery at Herlaugshaugen “closes the gap between Sutton Hoo and all these later Viking Age ship burials, such as Oseberg and Gostak,” says Matthias Toplak, director of Germany’s Hedeby Viking Museum.
He adds that the findings suggest there may have been “strong and ongoing cultural connection” between Scandinavia and England in the century before the Viking raids began.
“Everything that was so formative to the Viking Age—trading contacts, travel, cultural connections—all this starts earlier,” says Toplak. “We can see it clearly in this early ship burial in Norway.”
Sailing toward the final battle
Grønnesby and his team say the pre-Viking people may have voyaged with the vessel in Herlaugshaugen for a few decades before the burial. They estimate that it was around 65 feet or longer and likely had fleets of oarsmen, but it’s not clear if it had a sail, he says.
John Ljungkvist, an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the study, agrees that the ship was formidable. “Rivets that size could only be from a very large ship,” he says. “It’s a massive ship burial.”
One question that remains a mystery is who, exactly, was buried with that colossal ship in Herlaugshaugen.
(An intact Viking ship burial held riches—and a surprising mystery)
“It must have been a person of a special social status,” Grønnesby says, “because it was an enormous amount of work to build a mound.”
The notion hints at the power and organization of the pre-Viking society at the time, says Christina Lee, a Viking expert at the University of Nottingham, who was not involved in the study.
“You need a community to build it,” she says. “You don’t get a ship burial unless you’re really high-up.”
Much of what historians know about Norse mythology and Viking and pre-Viking beliefs comes from poems and lore recoded in 13th-century Icelandic literature, a few hundred years after the Viking era. Carved memorial tablets, including the Gotlandic picture stones, also provide some hints.
According to these poetic sources, where one went in the afterlife depended not only on their status in life, but on how they died. Half of slain warriors went to Valhalla, the hall of the chief god Odin, to feast and drink and prepare for a final apocalyptic battle.
(Inside the elaborate world of Viking funerals)
The ship in an elite burial “may be a symbol for the vessel that transports the dead person to the other side, to the realm of the dead,” says Ljungkvist, adding that, “the lore is complicated, so we don’t know for sure.”
The notion that death was also a form of travel resonates in Viking lore, says Lee: “Ships and the last journey—there may be some connection.”
